Even though Amalfi coast is the most famous romantic coast in Italy, Cinque Terre is the new trend destination, especially after UNESCO made it a World Heritage Site due to the "harmonious interaction between people and nature". In the recent years, there are more tourists visiting it, probably because it is super instagrammable right now, so you should visit it while you can still get some nature out of it. In this post, I will mention my humble suggestions about where to go, what to do, what to eat and how much to stay.
Cinque terre literally means 5 hills in Italian and it is because of obvious reasons: it is composed of 5 town, built on 5 hills right next to each other. These town are:
Riomaggiore
Manarola
Corniglia
Vernezza
Monterosso
1. CINQUE TERRE OVER AMALFI
First of all, logistics. Cinque Terre is located on the West North coast of Italy and is extremely easy to reach by trains from other touristic destinations, like Milano, Pisa or Florence. This allows you to create an Italian itinerary that combines Cinque Terre with shopping in Milano and art crawl in Florence without wasting half of your time in the trains. If this is not your plan and you wish to visit only Cinque Terre, you might use the airport either in Pisa, Genova, Milano, Turin or Florence and still reach it pretty quick. Amalfi coast on the other hand is located on the West South coast of Italy. Reaching Amalfi might be easy from Napels, but if you are willing to have an itinerary with Rome, keep in mind that reaching there with the train is gonna take more time.
Another issue is activities. Cinque Terre is mostly preferred for hiking, since the towns are located on the hills and there are hiking trails that connect these towns to each other. There are also amazing beaches that you can enjoy, but you might need to opt for rocky beaches more than sand, besides Monterosso. On the other hand, Amalfi coast if most preferable for beaches. So, it's up to you.
Even if I prefer the sea more than the hiking, I still prefer Cinque Terre because the hiking option somehow changes the tourist profile you will find around you, people are more cozy and relaxed, even though Amalfi is more high profile.
2. WHERE TO STAY
Let's say that you are convinced to visit Cinque Terre. The first thing you would do is to visit booking.com and search the options with the best price/quality ratio located in Cinque Terre, right? Well, it shouldn't be. Even though Cinque Terre has 5 towns, they are super small and they are located on hills. So, I wouldn't suggest you to arrange your accommodation here. They don't have big hotels, they have small boutique bed and breakfasts and this is why the prices are insanely high. Plus, if you are traveling with a cabin sized luggage, you will be in trouble reaching to and from your hotel. Alternatively, you might search for places in La Spezia, Genova or Pisa based on your itinerary. From La Spezia and Pisa, there are direct trains right to Cinque Terre and it costs practically nothing ($15 maybe). Plus, if you are a traveler with itineraries as long as possible, you might be able to arrange your whole trip much easier.
Even though many bloggers might recommend staying in Cinque Terre, I don't agree. I would come here early, have early dinner in my favorite village, see it also with shiny lights and that's it. Keep in mind that the beauty of this spot comes with the vibrant colors of buildings and the sea, and it will not look mind blowing good during night. Still, I would be extra careful with the train timetables if this is your choice: Italy does not have the best taxi service and there is no Uber - so be prepared!
3. HOW TO REACH
Between each village, there are the hiking trails, but those trails are off limits almost before April and after October. But Cinque Terre is amazing to visit any time of the year as long as you get lucky with the weather and catch the warm sun. If that is the case, or if you simply don't want to hike all the road, the train service connects all the towns to each other and there is the train almost every 10/15 minutes. Even for traveling between the towns, you will need a validated ticket, that you should buy from the ticket machines and validate in the electronic validation boxes. You should expect occasional inspections, and if you don't have a validated ticket, it might cost you about $50.
The beauty of this ticket is that you don't have to buy single tickets for every use. Once you buy your ticket and validate, your ticket is validated within 4 hours after the validation time and you can use it to travel. If you come from Pisa or La Spezia, this train ticket already includes this pass ticket, so you can keep using it as long as your ticket is valid. Cinque Terre is a really popular destination so expect a lot of crowd inside the trains as well. Be extra careful with your belongings!
Even though Trenitalia gives a schedule of trains, I can assure you that it's gonna be useless. Make sure not to lose the very last train of the day, but other than that don't make your plans strictly depending on the trains.
You might have the idea of renting a car and traveling with it instead of dealing with the train. Let me tall you: just don't! Some of these villages do not even let cars enter their town. Even if they do, finding a park will be a pain in the a. Even if you find a car park, all the stress is not going to worth it because of your time, effort and frustration. If you are considering to rent a car JUST for Cinque Terre, just don't. If you already have a car and still want to spend a day visiting Cinque Terre, leave your car in La Spezia and reach your destinations by train. This is more or less the same deal for Scooter, just keep that dream for Tuscan villages.
4. WHAT TO DO
I wish I could say there are a bunch of things to do here, but there are not and that's the beauty of it! There are basically four things you can do here:
Take photos: Let's be honest, this is probably why you are here for the first place! Cinque terre gives you the perfect spots at every 5 steps to take perfect photos! Riomaggiore and Manarola are more famous compared to the other ones and even without doing too much walk from the train station, you will enjoy the sea view with the vibrant houses in the back ground.
You can also walk around the cities for a while, especially to find a bite to eat, souvenir shopping or just take more photos. However, these are really small towns and you shouldn't expect that much.
Enjoy the sea: Because of the rocky structure of the hills, there are not many sandy beaches that go along for kilometers. However, this doesn't mean that you cannot enjoy the sea! The only tricky part might be to locate the best places to approach, but just try to locate people who swim and try to reach their choice. My favorite places are Riomaggiore and Monterosso. I also heard that the sea is quite enjoyable in Manarola as well. Riomaggiore, Manarola and Vernazza are located on rocky hills by the sea, so going to the sea is somehow doable. Monterosso is the easiest one, since they have long straight beaches you might use and is literally the first thing you see when you leave the train station. Unfortunately, Corniglia is located up on the hill. You can still reach the sea from the train station if you are willing to climb up and down 400 stairs - which is just nonsense for me.
PS: As I mentioned, Monterosso has long beaches and you will find many umbrellas that belong to beach clubs. You might prefer paying for them daily and just relax. If not, according to the Italian law, citizens are allowed to swim from the shore even though the beach is private property. Leave your belongings within 100m to the sealine and you'll be good to go. Staff of the beach club will tell you that it's private property but let me assure you: there is practically nothing they can do. If not, go to the old part of the town (literally 10 minutes by walk) and you can find a free beach there.
Do hiking: Honestly, I am not dying for hiking in general and especially in a place like Cinque Terre, I feel like using my time for the wrong cause. However, hiking is a pretty common thing to do here.
Keep in your mind that not all the hiking trails will be available during your visit either due to the weather conditions or just because so. Not to get disappointed by these circumstances and plan your time more efficiently, you might want to check hiking the Blue Trail here.
Try traditional food: Food in Italy is amazing, yes. But in each region or even each city there are specialties of that location and I definitely recommend you to try them, for your visit to Cinque Terre but also for your visit in Italy.
The first thing you definitely have to try is pasta con pesto. You probably already know the pesto, but this part of Italy is where people first created. This is definitely the best place to taste fresh pesto and gt it for lunch.
Another specialty is focaccia. This is a mixture between bread and pizza dough and is just amazing as a snack or if you are willing to go simple with lunch. You can get it from any bar or any panificio. You might want to try the plain one to get the best from its taste, with tomatoes, which is my personal favorite, or even with pesto if you cannot taste pasta con pesto - even though it's not very traditional. I constantly visit the panificio in the main street on the old town part and it never disappoints me.
PS: you might consider getting your focaccia around 5PM and catch the aperitivo time! You might sit down on a piazza, sip your spritz and enjoy Italy while eating your focaccia and some delicious olives.
Being that close to the seaside automatically made Cinque Terre an amazing location to have fish for dinner. You might go either with some oven cooked fish or a fish sandwich, but my heart beats for fried fish! My personal suggestion for dinner is Vernezza. There are more restaurants by the sea over there and most of the tourists prefer hanging out more in Monterosso, Manarola or Riomaggiore, so you might get less waiting time and better prices respectively.
PS2: while eating all these amazing dishes, don't forget to leave some space for gelato.
5. WHAT TO WEAR
I try not to give dressing advice in my posts generally but I should mention some details here that you should consider. The first one is about the footwear. It gets pretty hard to decide since you might want to skip from hiking to beach all at the same day, you might want to bring a flip flop in you bag and wear your sneakers. This is what I would do in general, but for Cinque Terre this might be not the best option. The seaside is quite rocky and even inside the sea somehow swimming barefoot might be dangerous and uncomfortable. Instead of flip flops, you might consider sea shoes.
The authorities are considering to ban tourists wearing flip flops. Even if you don't hike between the towns, the city itself is quite rocky and hilly. Eventually, lots of tourists end up calling emergency service after falling or injuring their ankle and since there is no car road effectively running in the towns, ambulance helicopters are sent for these patients. This takes too much effort for the hospital services, especially for accidents that are way too obvious and can simply be avoided. Banning it might be too much, but I completely agree that wearing flip flops, high heel shoes or even sandals might be impractical.
You might want to have your swimsuit with you and eventually end up completely wet. Most of the times, you might have difficult times finding a place to change your clothes, so be prepared to find a cave to do so or just wear your swimsuits on you to begin the day. If you are willing to stay there for dinner, consider having a dry pair of clothes that are not just swimwear. Italians really care about how they look and they care even more during the evening. Obviously having a nice outfit doesn't mean high hills or black tie, but try to use some common sense.
Labels: Cinque Terre, Highlights, Italy
